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Date: 2008-05-27 Best Online Purchase I Have Ever Made! First, the purchase and delivery experience: I purchased the pdp-5010fd directly from amazon.com, and I could not have been happier with the experience. I ordered it online on Saturday evening, and the local delivery company called me on Wednesday to arrange for a delivery time on Thursday morning. The television was not supposed to have arrived until the following week. When the television arrived, two men carried it in, uncrated it, and set it on my stand. All told it took 10 minutes tops. The delivery men were very courteous and waited around for me to inspect the television for breakage or defect but not for me to turn it on and make sure it worked. I saved hundreds over purchasing this television locally, and I would totally make another purchase of this expense again from amazon.com. The television itself: In a word, outstanding! I absolutely love this television. I expected the hd channels to look awesome, and they are (I cannot wait until football this fall), but for me the pleasant surprise is that 480p content from my sony es dvd player looks very good, also, through component video. I had read that this television did a good job of upconverting content 480i/480p content, but it is much better than I expected. You will not be disappointed in the performance of this television. Ours is in the living room, which is quite bright during the day, as a lot of sunlight comes in, and it still looks great. I also have no issue with the amount of reflection on the screen (it is less than the old 31" CRT television that it replaced). Date: 2008-05-02 A Kuro convert After considerable time and effort over the last few months researching what "type" of HDTV to get, plasma won over LCD. With this choice behind me, the KURO pretty much dominated the competition. I spent countless hours looking at screens in stores. The Panasonic and Samsung plasmas are good but not anywhere near as good as this KURO. This is unfortunate, because there is a considerable price premium to be paid for the KURO. It IS worth it! So let me start with a warning for the videophiles out there: The default setings on this TV (which is what you are likely to "see" when you preview this at the Best Buys of the world) are set for watching cartoons! In this mode, the colors are oversaturated to the extreme, so when looking at skin tones they all look sunburnt! Trees look like they have been painted green, a room in a Victorian home will look like it has been painted with bright reds and or royal purples! It really is a very odd choice...So, spend the half hour or so to read through the manual on how to bring your TV back to normal. Now the details: For off-the-air content, with my old $20 Magnavox amplified loop for antenna input, the HD programs from ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS are jaw dropping! I have never seen anything like this. Moreover, the automatic TV tuner setup routine has picked up channels I never knew existed! Even TV-Guide channel listing info... By comparison, analog programs (Matlock and Law and Order re-runs for example) looked just "ok". Unfortunatelly, compared to the HD quality, ANY analog program will look just "ok" on this display. The biggest "probem" with this TV is that the display quality is SO good, that if you give it a sub-par input (whatever the source may be) you will really be able to SEE sub-par quality. KURO's electronics will compensate, quite well mind you, but there is only so much magic that can be performed here with analog programs, in terms of noise reduction and up-conversion. I wonder how things will change when I get a "real antenna" (CM 4228 comes to mind here) up and running. Then again, all the analog broadcasts will end in a few months, so the entire issue of sub-par quality of-the-air programs will be of academic interset to TV historians...but I digress. For playback, I hooked up my $80 Sony NS72 (upconverting) DVD player -this is just a little older than the current NS75-. I used the HDMI connection, so that I could send 1080p upconverted signals to the KURO. Man, oh man was I stunned! Everything I threw at it came out with such gorgeous detail! Watching any of the space scenes in the Starwars movies, there was no way to tell where the top and bottom black bars started on the screen, except by looking for the point where the background stars "disappear". Watching Mary Poppins, I could see Julie's makeup on her face! I ran the HQV Silicon Optix test DVD revealing, quite clearly I am afraid, all the shortcomings of my cheap DVD player. In matters of image detail, color fidelity and contrast and cadence the KURO -and the DVD- passed with flying colors...I could not find jaggies in the flag test. The flower, boat ride, freeway and sunset scenes were stunning. The race car zooming past the stands showed moire, but this is Sony's fault! Looking at of-the-air HD car races with cars and cameras zooming/panning past stands and the like, these are rock solid images...The cadence tests reveal what happens when you display 1080p/24fps, or any number of very esoteric cadences. There is no 3:2 frame-rate nonsense with the KURO. You'll be really hard pressed to find "jaggies" in anything except perhaps a couple of cartoon or anime cadences. I am not sure how this "failure" will ever be seen in a live program. I wonder if anyone out there is feeding home-video to thisTV directly from a video-camera that has some weird recording cadence. That might replicate such effects... but again, I digress. As a second battery of what I like to call graduate student checks, I connected the DVD player to the TV with the composite video cables. The DVD here does no "upconverting" to 1080p. It merely puts out the 480p progressive scan it was designed for. The KURO on the other hand has some wonderful magic here. The same movies (Starwars and Mary Poppins) were perfectly viewable, only marginally below the quality of the ones through the HDMI. So, do not feel compelled to throw away your "older" DVD player just because it is "merely" a 480p progressive scan type. For ultimate performance this TV, unfortunatelly, pretty much requires a Blu-Ray player. But I am not in any hurry yet. Last, but by no means least, I should mention the audio performance of the KURO, which is in fact closer to that of a good sound bar. When running the THX audio setup from the Starwars DVD, the speaker bar generated a clearly discernible directional sound for the L, R and C channels when the L,R and C were triggered. When the surround-L and surround-R speakers were triggered the speakerbar produced "back-firing" sounds, (from the left and right side respectively) that reflected off the wall behind the TV! This was quite astounding. The surround sound effect is quite nicely done with what is essentially a very effective phased-array approach! Congrats to the Pioneer sound engineers. This is top notch work! Triggering the "sub" produces no responce from the speakerbar. The KURO has an independent sub output, so if anyone wants to "improve" the speakerbar, a sub can be direclty linked to the TV and will provide all the low-end oomph you might desire. Clearly, having a high quality audio system generate a high quality soundstage will be a wonderful complement to the visual perfection from this TV. That being said, the current speakerbar is good enough for anyone who does not plan to do this right away. Before I sign off, I should point out that with 4-HDMI inputs, a digital audio out, and a subwoofer out, this TV in many ways eliminates the need to have an A/V receiver with more than two HDMI inputs. There are a lot of very good middle-of-the-road receivers that only have two HDMI inputs and the everyone seems to be complaining about how inadequate this is. With this KURO -and HDMI control- the TV can become the switch-board rather than the receiver. Inter-Brand and HDMI incompatibilities aside, having spent all this money on the Kuro I see no reason not to take advantage of its capabilities... This TV will spoil you... (:- Date: 2008-04-05 The best purchase I've ever made I would love to add my 5 star comments to everyone else who has ever reviewed this product. Much like them, I SCOURED over different TV models/specifications to determine which was the best. This was a gift to myself, and I was ready to buy the top of the line. All roads led me to Pioneer Plasmas. When starting off with a demand to provide me the best overall quality picture, I initially narrowed my search to plasma and this was far and away the best product out there. I have had this TV for over 5 months now, and I love it as much now as I did when I first bought it. My desire was to have it professionally calibrated after ~100 hours of viewing, but out of the box, the quality is just so amazing, I'm having a hard time justifying the expense. The black levels (which really is the most important quality of a television, NOT resolution as people in the stores would want you to believe) are incredible - and this TV outperforms every other one on the market by a significant amount. The picture, in my opinion, produces more vibrant colors even better than my parents' Sony 61" SXRD LCoS projection. There has been no issue with burn-in on images, even with extended hours of watching ESPN with its logo sitting in the corner the entire time. The reflection off the screen is unnoticeable when the TV is on. Other reviews have commented on the "audible buzzing" when the TV is on. While you can hear it if you put your ear up to the TV, it has never been an issue or interfered with my viewing experience. The quality of the sound from the speakers is commendable as well. I look forward to many years of happy viewing with this Pioneer and recommend it as highly as I can recommend a product. Spend the money, and you won't be sorry. Date: 2008-04-04 A Stunning State of the Art Unbelievable picture quality on both HD and SD sources. The black levels are truly astonishing. The dynamic Contrast Ratio is 20,000:1 and static (ANSI) CR is 448:1. This is approaching CRT performance and far exceeds any other platform (LCD, plasma, etc.) I wanted something that was going to last, so I did extensive homework on the KURO. While the KURO is a total redesign, it is a Pioneer 8th generation--a very stable platform. The repair rate, according to Consumer Reports, for Pioneer plasmas is 3% (statistically equivalent to major brand LCDs). And talk about future-ready. This panel has 4(!) HDMI v1.3 inputs and 2 component video inputs. It has PC connectivity and is one of the only tvs available that accepts 1080p/24 signals. It does so by changing it's display to 72Hz...no need for a 2:3 pull down so you have a much less jittery film. Absolutely stunning! Date: 2008-03-02 Unreal Plasma I've had this tv for about a month and am absolutely in love with it. I spent months reading reviews and customer opinions on AVS before deciding to make the leap. My other tv is a Samsung 4254 plasma that I purchased a few years back and I noticed considerable noise on the screen and artifact problems during movies. This tv is is worlds better than that one and none of those same problems exist. No buzzing as some have experienced btw. Now my only problem is my addiction to blu ray movies. I can't wait to watch no country for old men on this set...friendo. * Price is subject to change. |
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